CHAPTER 4
Back to work the next day, of course, and I was on the folder. I don’t like platform pedals, and riding in a suit was a pain in the arse, quite literally at times, but my boss had taken a firm line on appearing at a trader’s in lycra.

So I got about by train or by bus, folding bike to hand, briefcase strapped to the rear carrier. It was a rather nice folder, actually, an Airnimal, but it still came with platform rather than clipless pedals, and I hated them. If only Clark’s would put out a man’s dress shoe with a recessed cleat…I had a sudden mental image of my court shoes fitted with SPDs, and paused for a fit of giggles as I left the house.

MAC, my current boss, had tried to make me wear a magic plastic hat for some spurious health and safety reason, but that one I had refused point blank. He had tried to live up to his nickname, though, tried to pick away at everything I did, even banning me from storing my bike in the office till I brought in its bag and pointed out the cricket and football equipment also in the store room. The Man was definitely A Cunt, and although I couldn’t remember who first came up with the acronym, it was perfect. I just wished he would stop calling me ‘mate’, for that was one thing I would never be to him.

Every time I had a run-in with him, I wondered, just a little, now much of Jill was showing at work. That was a major source of my fears, the reception at work. Too many people with what can only be described politely as firm points of view, and impolitely but more accurately as bigots.

Court shoes and a Laura Ashley or Monsoon frock on the folder…that at least brought a smile, before I hit the mean streets of Redhill. That day was a simple one, according to the assignment code, but I knew full well that the half-day I had been allocated for the Curry Palace was likely to spread into the early evening, if not another day’s work.

“Morning, Mr Khan, I have an appointment…”

“Mr Carter?”

“Indeed. Where do you want me?”

He led me into a small room off the kitchen, and the records were laid out after the ritual discussion about how he operated. Two minutes after I opened the Purchase Day Book, his accountant appeared.

“Hello, Rob. How are you this fine morning?”

“Not raining yet, Vijay, so it can only get worse”

“Mr Carter, you bring a ray of sunshine to every visit. I am going to be helping my client with his PAYE calculations, so if there is anything I can be doing to help…?”

“You know me, Vijay, I shall just be settled here in my little nest, ploughing away”

And probably finding a pile of shit in the process, of course, that you have missed. Nice guy, Vijay, but you really are thick.

That brought a small wave of affection for the man. Yes, he really was a nice guy, one of the nicest, and as honest as sunlight, but he couldn’t spot a fiddle if it sat on his shoulder and played a jig. I put my head down, and within two hours I had the handle on what the stupid bugger had missed.

I need to explain a few things about Value Added Tax, which is allegedly a simple tax, easy to apply. The trader, if a retailer, can claim back all the VAT he pays out on things he buys for his business, such as booze, in the Palace’s case. Against that, he sets off the tax on his sales. Khan was on Retail Scheme A, which is the simplest. He should simply have added up his daily gross takings for each period, in other words everything that went into his till, and applied the VAT calculation, which with the rate then at 17.5% meant dividing the lot by 117.5 and multiplying the resulting number by 17.5. Simple. Take away the VAT claimed back, and that gave the sum he owed the Crown.

I compared that to his bankings. He would, he said, count op his DGT, and then make all his cash payments from them, including paying his staff in folding money, and the rest he banked. Vijay, surely even you could spot the difficulty in thus banking, on a daily basis, more than one’s declared gross takings? I sighed, and started to make some approximations, a cup of bad coffee already cold next to me. Partway through I realised Vijay was looking down at my notebook.

“Rob…you have found a problem?”

“Oh yes”

“Oh shit, Rob, I hope you do not think that I, you know?”

I gave him the best smile I could. “No, Vijay, no, we all know how honest you are, I just need to get my boss down for a word, aye?”

I slipped out to stretch my legs, and made the call. To give MAC his due, he was quick off the mark, and half an hour later he was asking Khan to take him through the cashing up. As Khan finished, MAC looked straight at him, and said:

“I don’t believe you. You’re a liar, aren’t you?”

MAC.

Khan, to my amazement, burst into tears, and we got a semi coherent stream of woe about family expenses in Sylhet and rising wage expectations among immigrant chefs. Apparently, the greedy sods wanted money more in keeping with the costs of living in the United Kingdom rather than Bangladesh, and resented being used as cheap labour. Fancy that!

MAC worked through a series of deals that his higher grade allowed, while I took notes, and by the time we left I had the notes for an assessment of unpaid tax in the region of six grand. Not a huge sum, and certainly nowhere near what Khan had stolen, but it was better than nothing. MAC was happy, having had his daily feast of backstabbing.

“Well, mate, if I were you, I wouldn’t eat there again. Chef might have some special sauce for you”

“I always try and refuse the file for anywhere I do eat. Don’t want to see the kitchen, yeah?”

“Good point. Look, it’s half four, that was a good piece of work, why don’t you bugger off home early?”

“You sure, John?”

“Aye, I am. Just make sure you get it written up by tomorrow”

Ah. Go home, but finish the job there. MAC.

“See you in the morning, then. I have an office day”

That gave me a window, and I rang the number, and they had an opening, for it was the time of day when the rush has limped and staggered to a close. Doctor Evans would see me. I lashed everything to the back of the bike, and set off before my courage did.

“Robert Carter to room six, please”

I found the door, knocked; “Come in!”

The doctor was a new one to the surgery, and as someone who avoided them like the plague I was without a regular quack. She was mid-thirties, blonde, pretty in a sort of rinsed-through, non-colourfast way, and she had my notes ready.

“How can I help today? Reception says lower back pain?”

No, the pain in the lowest part of my back had already returned to his office. Breathe deeply, and get it out.

“It’s not an easy one, Doctor. I have a rather unusual personal problem”

“I can give you the address for the GUM clinic, Mr Carter”

“Er, no thank you, it isn’t VD. Look, the way I got this out to a friend…look, my parents officially had three sons, but one of them is really a daughter, and that’s me, and I don’t know what to do, and I need to do something before I am too old, and if I don’t, and I don’t want to be sitting there again with a knife or a bottle of pills and I’m sorry…”

She had passed me the tissues as all the floods I had held back from Karen washed over the locked gates of my screwed-up soul.

“How long have you known, Robert?”

“Some things are clichés, Doctor, and I am one. Since I was old enough to know there was a difference I didn’t have, yeah? I like to think of it as self-awareness. I knew who I was, but my parents didn’t, and I had to learn, you know, to be someone else, someone they thought I was”

She smiled, and there was actual warmth there.

“Robert, I will set your mind at rest. One of the things about what you may be suffering from is denial, and you are presenting in a rather normal way”

“But that is the point, I’m not normal, am I?”

“Why? You have a tail, or two hearts? No, I mean that many people who suffer from that…situation try and cope in a number of ways, and a classic presentation is a, sorry, butch man who loses the struggle in maturity and, well, feels the need to–I am making this sound too clinical. Sorry. Have you had any mental health referrals before, without my ploughing through your notes?”

“Some years ago. They put me on anti-depressants for a while. I stopped taking them; made the world too unreal, took away my control”

“You need control?”

“People…”

Deep breath. “Women like me, they get killed in some cases, don’t they? That girl, down the road, off the bridge?”

Her mouth tightened, just for an instant. “Yes, indeed, and you feel you need to keep your control for safety? Self-protection?”

“Exactly”

“Well, look. We have a clinic, over in Reigate, part of the NHS New Minds or whatever the clever name is. Would you like me to refer you?”

“Please”

And that was just about that. I had now crossed two of my biggest hurdles, telling friends and looking for treatment. People say that the biggest step in dealing with any problem is always the act of recognition, acceptance in the first place that one has a problem. I had known it was there since I first knew that I had been locked out of the girl’s world I belonged in, that I was too deformed to play nicely where I needed to. That first step, the acceptance, I had taken that fifty years or so ago.

I picked up a bottle on the way home. I needed to switch off. I sat that evening looking at the story site and eating a kebab and too many chips with a litre of cheap Italian white, and as I read the account of the Gabycon ride I drifted into a short fantasy of arriving as myself, as I had been at University, and the wine was followed by whisky.

I was taking the steps, but however it ended up, it wasn’t going to be as a pretty girl on a bike. Ever.